Facing problems with poise... or not.

At the beginning of this month I noticed that the most recent updates to WordPress messed up with a few things Insanitek’s co-founder, Ali, did with his homemade theme. You couldn’t access the e-courses, so students couldn’t work on their education. The shop wasn’t working either, which meant people couldn’t get things they wanted or needed.

And, of course, Ali disappeared without warning back in December, so I was left cleaning up a mess.

Every plan I had made was thrown out the window at that moment. Everything, that is, outside of working directly with clients. No content marketing, no lab work, no family time, no breaks. Just diving deep into what makes a functional website from a user perspective, asking our current clients what they liked and what they would tell us sucked.

I spent nearly a full week talking to people about their user experience here, then started looking for a theme. I did it backward, apparently. According to the “gurus”, I’m supposed to follow a specific formula. Ha! I thought a website was supposed to be useful. My bad. According to the gurus it’s about differentiating yourself…

Where is the uniqueness in following someone’s formula?

Hell, where is the usefulness that makes people grow and allows you to serve?

Seems like everything I do with Insanitek is done on intuition based in a desire to serve. None of it is proven, nor is it optimised for maximum sale in minimum time. I didn’t build Insanitek from the standpoint of turning a quick buck. Guess all those adverts promising I’ll turn 6 figures plus just aren’t for this company. We’re grounded in reality, not in some arbitrary number.

Instead we go for what works for us. So should you.

There are lots of things that people will tell you that you have to do in order to be successful. Thing is, it’s not completely wrong. Nor is it completely right.

What you should do is follow your own vision, then use the tools to create the path you want. Think about what your message and mission is, your clients, and how you want the interface between the two facets to interact. If you want to work with people one on one so you can dive deep, don’t worry about group events. If you like meat space (real life) events, don’t waste your time with trying a lot of digital things.

For us, we like people to have the flexibility of DIY, guided DIY, and full-fledged guided classes — whatever they actually need. As time passes, we are slowly building up the possibility for all levels of guidance across the topics. It isn’t so right now, but that’s the Ultimate Goal.

Knowing this made restructuring the website slightly easier. The fact that I didn’t have a clue what to do, nor the desire to waste a lot of time on it, made me lose my poise… more than a little.

Frustration clouds the mind, but clarifies lessons.

While I angrily surfed through hundreds of WordPress theme demos looking for the “perfect” theme replacement with enough support in case things started to fail again within a shoestring budget, I cursed.

I’m not one for getting overly emotional about things. Ali and I started Insanitek in 2007 — and he was obsessed with making it a forum site. Two rounds of failed types of forum sites later, I had a real business plan that would bring Insanitek to actual life. Ali was excited at the time, but he didn’t understand what a commit it would be, nor what it would take to pull off a legit business. He was down for it until his health got bad and he had to fight through a bunch of other life shit.

The kind of shit where the police beat him for trying to get above his social class in Saudi. The kind of shit where his life is threatened for trying to do better because his own parents were scared of what would happen. The kind of shit where he escaped to Canada, but realised they are racist there too.

Ali withdrew from the world and Insanitek on his own will. I don’t know where he went or what happened, but he couldn’t take things anymore as they stood. I had every reason to curse the world on Ali’s behalf.

But, that screams immaturity… so I did it quietly.

I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that you should always take the higher road. Sometimes you need a little cathartic release to be able to move on. And once I bemoaned the world, I took my neighbours dogs out for a walk and thought about the whole situation.

I came to the conclusion that it teaches me, as the owner of a company, I need to be prepared for anything that may come up in case of emergency.

This is important for any business because, while you don’t want to think of your colleagues as replaceable, you do need to consider the health of your company. If you rely too heavily on one person, and then that person needs to leave for a while, you don’t want your company’s health to falter. And you don’t want to be in the place where you’d have to make your colleague feel guilty for needing to take care of an ill parent or kid. Or, gods forbid, go on vacation and recharge.